Struggling through tears, the mother of an 8-year-old who was abducted from a Florida Walmart and later raped and killed said the man accused of the crime had convinced her he was a good Samaritan who was trying to help her family out.

Rayne Perrywinkle sat facing 61-year-old defendant Donald Smith in a Jacksonville courtroom, and testified about the day her daughter, Cherish Perrywinkle, disappeared.

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Smith is charged with first-degree murder, kidnapping and rape. If convicted, he faces a possible death sentence.

Perrywinkle said Smith had been hovering around her and her three daughters while they shopped at a discount store earlier in the day. She was looking for clothes for all three children and could not afford it.

Smith watched as Perrywinkle tried to work out how to pay for the clothes, she testified, and said when she came outside he was waiting. He offered to take them to a nearby Walmart and make purchases with a gift card.

The mother testified that she was wary, but accepted because Smith assured her his wife would meet them at the Walmart.

“He looked into my face and told me I was safe,” Perrywinkle said.

“Did you want to believe him?” prosecutor Mark Caliel asked.

“Very much so,” Perrywinkle replied.

The mother and her three daughters piled into Smith’s white van. They went to a nearby Walmart and she began shopping with her girls, placing three small piles of clothing in a shopping cart.

It got late, after 10 p.m., and Smith’s wife never appeared. Perrywinkle said her daughters were getting restless because they had not had dinner.

Smith told Perrywinkle he would go to a McDonald’s inside the store and get them cheeseburgers. Cherish Perrywinkle followed him and was never seen alive again.

Rayne Perrywinkle said 20 minutes later, she realized the McDonald’s inside the Walmart was closed and she began to panic. Her cellphone didn’t work — a daughter had dunked it in water to try and clean it — so she cried out for help realizing her daughter had been taken.

“I was yelling ‘Call 911! My daughter’s been taken,’ and no one would help me right away,” she said. About 40 minutes after her daughter disappeared, an employee gave her a cellphone and she called 911, prosecutors said.

Surveillance footage from the store caught the image of Smith and Cherish Perrywinkleexiting, the girl skipping out behind him.

“No one noticed. It looked like a grandfather and a granddaughter,” State Attorney Melissa Nelson told the jury during her opening statement.

She said Cherish Perrywinkle's mutilated body would later be found in a creek. She’d been raped, smothered and had blunt force trauma to the back of her head. She was wearing an orange dress with a fruit pattern on it. When Smith was arrested, Nelson said he was wet from the waist down.

Smith’s defense attorney, Julie Schlax, suggested to the jury that Rayne Perrywinkle made poor decisions getting into the van.

She said she would cross-examine Perrywinkle, but after the mother’s testimony Smith told his attorneys not to cross examine her.

Before his arrest for Cherish’s death, Smith had a long criminal history dating back to the 1970s related to lewd and lascivious conduct. Doctors determined that he met the criteria of a violent sexual predator after arrests in 1999, and he had served prison time and been ordered to get treatment, according to the Florida Times-Union newspaper.

In 2009, he posed as a child welfare worker and asked a child sexually explicit questions on the telephone and was arrested on felony charges, which were later reduced to misdemeanors, the newspaper reported.